Guest Speaker at Faculty Meeting

At the university's opening faculty meeting this morning, the guest speaker was Betty Siegel, president of Kennesaw State University in Georgia. She was a great, down-home, sweet-talkin' Georgia peach who's a great speaker. She said she was in Sequoia National Park a couple of weeks ago (guess who else was there, too!), and she said she asked a ranger how tall the trees were. The answer was that the tallest trees were more than 300 feet tall. "Wow!" she replied. "I'll bet their roots go halfway to China." "No," answered the ranger. "In fact, sequoia trees have some of the shallowest root systems of any tree. Seuquoia roots rarely go more than a couple of inches deep. In fact, they often lie on top of the rocky ground." "How can they stand for so long, then?" she asked. "Their secret has to do with the fact that you never, ever, see a sequoia standing by itself. They are only found in groves. Each sequoia spreads its roots out. Each tree intertwines its roots with the roots of its neighboring trees. Together, they weave an impenetrable mat of roots which holds up the entire forest. Each tree is entirely dependent on the other trees' roots for support. If you cut down or kill several sequoias in an area, the remaining trees quickly succumb to winds and storms, and within a matter of weeks, all the trees are down." Hmmmm. Nice little bit of philosophy, there. She got her point across quite nicely.